I hope the 9133
is intelligent enough to format the disk itself
Most HP drives aren't. I've only found ONE that would. I THINK it was a
9153 and it used a ST-225. But it's worth a try. However, most of the HP
I think you've mis-rememnbered. The 9153 (and the 9154, which is the same
unit without a floppy) use a special HP drive. It has a 40 pin connector,
carrying power and what seems to be 'raw' data (i.e. more like an ST506
interface than IDE or SCSI). I've not figured it out yet -- there are
custom chips at both ends of the cable and looking with a logic analyser
didn't intentify all the signals -- yet.
I beleive (although I am not certain as all I have is the 9154) that the
9153 uses the same floppy drive as the 9114B. That is, the later
half-height unit with the single 34 pin power/data connector.
There's a switch or link on the controller board of most of these hard
disk units to select whether the floppy is installed. If you pull the
floppy drive for any reason, yuo should flip this switch/link so that the
thing passes the self-test.
The 9133H does use an ST225, or at least mine do. But I found that if you
stick in any old ST225 (i.e. one without the HP low-level format) then
it'll fail the power-on diagnostics and you can't do anything with it.
Therefore low-level formatting must have been done in one of 4 ways :
1) An undocumented command, accepted even when the diagnostics failed.
2) A particular set of link/switch settings (which I don't know)
3) A special firmware EPROM
4) Another formatting device that was used to pre-format the drives
before they were stuck in the 9133 unit.
I have no idea which of these is the case.
drives use oddball drives that I was never able to
find replacements for.
If you do find a replacement drive, install it and just use the normal
format utility for your system. Most HP systems call it "Initialize".
>From what I can tell it usually does the equivelent to a high level fromat
Yes, the high-level format is possible on all the HP drive units I've
come accross. But not the low-leve one.
(sets up directory, FAT, etc) but not the Low Level
fromatting/disk testing
so it frequently fails with replacement drives.
That, alas, is my experience too.
-tony
